Al Gore controversies

Al Gore, former Vice-President of the United States (1993-2001), 2000 Democratic Party presidential nominee, and one of the winners of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, has been the subject of several controversies.

Fund raising

Gore was criticized for attending an event at the Buddhist Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights, California in 1996. He said that he was unaware it was a fundraising event though in an interview in 1997 he said it was wrong for him to attend.

The temple was later implicated in a campaign donation laundering scheme. In that scheme, donations nominally from Buddhist nuns in lawful amounts had actually been donated by wealthy monastics and devotees.

Robert Conrad, Jr., then head of a Justice Department task force appointed by Attorney General Janet Reno to investigate the fund-raising controversies, called on Reno in Spring 2000 to appoint an independent counsel to look into the fund-raising practices of Vice President Gore. Reno eventually rejected the request.

In March 1997, the then-Vice President also had to explain certain fund-raising calls he made to solicit funds for the Democratic Party for the 1996 election. In a news conference, Gore responded that

The phrase "no controlling legal authority" was severely criticized by some commentators, such as Charles Krauthammer, who wrote that "Whatever other legacies Al Gore leaves behind between now and retirement, he forever bequeaths this newest weasel word to the lexicon of American political corruption." On the other hand, Robert L. Weinberg argued in The Nation in 2000 that Gore actually had the U.S. Constitution in his favor on this, although he did concede that Gore's "use of the phrase was judged by many commentators to have been a political mistake of the first order" and noted that it was used often in stump speeches by George W. Bush when Bush was campaigning against Gore in that year's presidential race.

Internet

Al Gore was involved in the development and mainstreaming of the Internet as both Senator and Vice-President. Campbell-Kelly and Aspray note in Chapter 12 of their 1996 text, Computer: A History of the Information Machine, that up until the early 1990s public usage of the Internet was limited. They continue to state that the "problem of giving ordinary Americans network access had exercised Senator Al Gore since the late 1970s" leading him to develop legislation which would alleviate this problem. Gore thus began to craft the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 (commonly referred to as "The Gore Bill") after hearing the 1988 report Toward a National Research Network submitted to Congress by a group chaired by UCLA professor of computer science, Leonard Kleinrock, one of the central creators of the ARPANET (the ARPANET, first deployed by Kleinrock and others in 1969, is the predecessor of the Internet).

In 1999, various media outlets suggested that Gore claimed that he "invented the internet"
in reference to a CNN interview in which he said, "During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system."

In response to this controversy, Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn wrote a 2000-09-29 article (originally sent via email) which described Gore's contributions to the Internet since the 1970s, including his work on the Gore Bill:

Love Canal
On 30 November 1999, in response to a question about what students could do to involve themselves in the political process, Gore described to a New Hampshire high school his reaction in the late 1970s to a letter from a student in Toone, Tennessee, complaining about her family's poisoned well: "I called for a congressional investigation and a hearing. I looked around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. Had the first hearing on that issue, and Toone, Tennessee — that was the one that you didn't hear of. But that was the one that started it all." While the Associated Press story that covered the speech printed the quotation correctly, both the Washington Post and The Washington Times claimed that Gore had actually said: "I was the one that started it all".

The Post deferred to the AP version a few days later, but the Times never did, and continued to run editorials denouncing Gore's "boasting" of having been "the whistle blower for discovering Love Canal." The Republican National Committee and several conservative commentators at the time furthered the claim that Gore was attempting to take credit for discovering the toxic waste problem at Love Canal. However, Gore's supporters have argued that the context of the speech should make it clear that what had initially sparked his interest in toxic waste issues was the Toone, Tennessee situation. The organization issued a report which said that during August 2006 Gore's household consumed 22,619 kilowatt-hours — more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year. TIME stated that the Tennessee Center for Policy Research claimed to have gotten its figures from Nashville Electric Service. But company spokeswoman Laurie Parker said the utility never got a request from the policy center and never gave it any information."

In an earlier article in USA Today, Peter Schweizer argued that "according to public records, there is no evidence that Gore has signed up to use green energy in either of his large residences. When contacted Wednesday, Gore's office confirmed as much but said the Gores were looking into making the switch at both homes".

Response
TIME quoted Kalee Kreider, a spokesperson for Gore, saying that the Gore family tries to buy green energy to reduce their carbon footprint. She continued to say that since the controversy, the Gore family was "in the midst of installing solar panels on their home, which will enable them to use less power." She also added, "They also use compact fluorescent bulbs and other energy efficiency measures and then they purchase offsets for their carbon emissions to bring their carbon footprint down to zero." WKRN-TV reported that the Gore family obtains their power from the Nashville Electric Service's "renewable energy initiative", The Green Power Switch program which depends upon "wind, solar, and methane gas." The Detroit Free Press further noted that "Gore purchased 108 blocks of 'green power' for each of the past three months, according to a summary of the bills. That’s a total of $432 a month Gore paid extra for solar or other renewable energy sources. The green power Gore purchased is equivalent to recycling 2.48 million aluminum cans or 286,092 pounds of newspaper, according to comparison figures on NES’s Web site." The figure of 108 blocks of green power per month corresponds to 16,200 kilowatt-hours of electricity per month, Al Gore's average monthly use for 2005.

Keith Olbermann at MSNBC reported that the Gore home includes offices for both Gore and his wife and 'special security measures' making it unrepresentative of what the average US home consumes. Additionally, the green power purchased by the Gores increased the cost of their electricity by "$5,893, more than 50 percent, in order to minimize carbon pollution."

Kreider suggested in TIME that the attacks on Gore's energy use were political in nature and stated:

Chris Cillizza and Matthew Mosk in a Washington Post article quoted TCPR president Johnson as stating: "The energy he receives into his house is no different than what I receive into my house." They also noted that, "Kreider added that a renovation of the Gores' house is underway to make it more energy efficient, an update that will include the addition of solar panels."

An article in USA Today stated, "Zoning rules in Al Gore's upscale neighborhood kept the former vice president and environmental activist from installing solar panels on his roof...New rules going into effect on April 1 will allow homeowners to install solar panels on their roofs. But there's a caveat: 'Solar panels may be installed upon the roof of a building so long as they are not visible from the street or from any adjoining property,' according to the ordinance. Gore's roof does have flat areas where the panels could be placed, Franklin said. The builders at Gore's home plan to make the application for solar panels once the new ordinance goes into effect."
A June 2007 Associate Press photo showed that solar panels have been installed on the roof of Gore's Tennessee home.

Meat-eating and Climate Change
People for Ethical Treatment of Animals have directed a campaign against Al Gore due to his omnivorous diet and the fact that the issue of the impact of livestock on climate change was not mentioned in Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. This criticism is based on the 390 page that states that animal agriculture generates 18 per cent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions - more than the 13.5 per cent produced by all forms of transport combined.

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